His predecessors’ responses to nuclear programs discovered on their watch offer lessons

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When Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu talks about the Iranian nuclear
crisis, he frequently uses analogies drawn from World War II. But as he
returns home to consider his next moves in light of what he heard from
US President Barack Obama on Monday, I suspect he will be pondering
events much closer in time and space: the experiences of his two
immediate predecessors, Ariel Sharon and Ehud Olmert.

It was on Sharon’s watch, as Ronen Bergman related in The New York Times
in January, that Iran’s clandestine uranium enrichment operation at
Natanz was first discovered, thanks to “cooperation between American,
British and Israeli intelligence services.” Some Israeli officials
wanted the site “bombed at once.” But Sharon opted for a different plan:
“Instead, information about the site was leaked to a dissident Iranian
group, the National Resistance Council, which announced that Iran was
building a centrifuge installation at Natanz.”

The outcome is well known: The news, quickly confirmed by International
Atomic Energy inspectors, produced much talk but little action. Over the
next 10 years, several rounds of sanctions were imposed, but these
sanctions utterly failed to halt Iran’s nuclear program, which continued
to progress apace. Since 2002, Tehran has produced enough low-enriched
uranium for four nuclear bombs; further enriched some of this uranium to 20 percent, a step experts say
is far more difficult to master than the subsequent stage of going from
20 to 90 percent (which is what is needed for a bomb); installed thousands
of additional centrifuges, including at a new underground facility in
Fordow that would be almost impossible to attack; and conducted
experiments in weaponization, including technology to arm its missiles with nuclear warheads and “a highly sophisticated nuclear triggering technology that experts said could be used for only one purpose: setting off a nuclear weapon.”

One can understand why Sharon decided as he did. Natanz was discovered
at the height of the second intifada, when the army was fully occupied
in combating the Palestinian terrorists who were slaughtering civilians
in cities throughout Israel. Under these circumstances, the idea of
opening a second front against Iran must have seemed daunting.

But by not doing so, he allowed a relatively small problem to
metastasize. Iran now has far more nuclear facilities, far better
defenses, and above all, far more technological know-how than it did in
2002. Thus today, Iran’s nuclear program is both much harder to destroy
and much easier to rebuild than it would have been when it was first
discovered.

This lesson wasn’t lost on Sharon’s successor, Ehud Olmert, when he
faced a similar situation five years later: Israeli intelligence had
confirmed that Syria was building a nuclear reactor, and that it was
likely to become operational in another few months.

Olmert first presented the evidence to then-President George W. Bush and
asked him to bomb the reactor. But the Bush administration was divided:
While Vice President Dick Cheney supported Olmert’s request, Defense
Secretary Robert Gates and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rich preferred
the diplomatic option – getting the IAEA to declare Syria in violation
of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty and asking the Security Council
to impose sanctions. Ultimately, Bush sided with Gates and Rice: In his
memoirs, he wrote
that he proposed sending Rice to Israel immediately so she and Olmert
could give a press conference disclosing the reactor’s existence.

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But to his great credit (and it’s one of the very few decisions he made
as premier that I consider to his credit), Olmert rejected this proposal
out of hand. It couldn’t have been an easy decision: Syria has
thousands of missiles capable of striking anywhere in Israel, and
chemical warheads to load them with; the threat of massive retaliation
was very real. But he had seen firsthand, as a senior minister in
Sharon’s government, how ineffective the diplomatic option proved with
Iran, and he wasn’t prepared to let that failure be replicated on
Israel’s northern border. Given the mischief a non-nuclear Syria was
already making as the patron of anti-Israel terrorist organizations in
both Lebanon and Gaza, the threat of a nuclear Syria – whose
mischief-making potential would be vastly greater, because it would no
longer be restrained by fear of provoking an Israeli attack on Damascus –
was too deadly to be tolerated.

The decision Netanyahu faces is incomparably harder. The chances of an
attack on Iran being successful are unquestionably lower, given the much
greater distances, the greater number of targets that must be struck,
and Iran’s stronger defenses. It may well buy less time than the five
years and counting bought by the Syrian strike, since the technological
knowhow Iran has gained over the last 10 years will make rebuilding
easier. The likelihood of retaliation is greater, because while the
Syrian attack was a stealth operation that Damascus could and did decide
to ignore, any attack on Iran will be the culmination of a very public
confrontation, making it harder for Tehran to refrain from retaliation
without losing face. And finally, while Olmert was confident that Bush,
despite his initial opposition, would give Israel full backing after the
fact (as indeed happened), Netanyahu can have no such confidence about
Obama.

But all these risks will have to be balanced against one inescapable
fact: Sanctions and diplomacy have never yet succeeded in halting any
country’s nuclear program. They didn’t succeed in North Korea, as
detailed in a devastating blow-by-blow account
in PJ Media last month; they didn’t succeed in Pakistan; and they
aren’t succeeding in Iran – unless you define 10 years of steady
progress toward nuclear weapons as “success.” In contrast, military
action has succeeded the only two times it has been tried, in Iraq in
1981 and Syria in 2007: Neither country ever successfully reconstituted
its nuclear program.

I don’t know what decision Netanyahu will ultimately make, and I don’t
envy him the responsibility of making it. But one thing I’m certain of:
To persuade this very history-conscious prime minister to ignore the
history of the last 10 years, Obama will have to come up with something a
great deal more convincing than “trust me.”

The writer is a journalist and commentator.

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